Why?

The most commonly-asked question is why is there a need for a .MUSIC community-based top-level domain? What is .MUSIC?

.MUSIC is a specialized domain name for the global music community and industry. It is a music “badge” and recognizable web identity that gives legitimate music community members a distinct advantages over other top-level domain extensions.

A .MUSIC address will look like this in your web browser: http://www.YourName.music

.MUSIC is:

• Unique
• Memorable
• Short
• Self-explanatory
• Recognizable
• Trusted
• Brand-enhancing
• Consistent
• Practical

The shift of the music industry from a physical to a digital world has brought about a new meaning to the word “branding” for musicians. The biggest priority is branding themselves as a true music entity. The web has helped musicians, artists, bands, industry professionals and companies market themselves to new audiences. However, has the music community maximized their online presence? The underlying strategy is simple: create a brand and associate the brand with a home. In the physical world, we all have a place to call home, where we live, eat and sleep. The virtual world of the Internet is unfortunately a different case for most of the music community. There is no dedicated official website that you can call your own home. More importantly, there is no official website domain name that represents the music community. Time has come for all of us to brand ourselves on the web with a unique identifier and a place we can call home, the music industry standard for official music websites: .MUSIC

The Secret of Branding: Is your Story compelling enough?

The archaic concept of “selling out” no longer hurts artists, unless they align themselves with brands that are not consistent with their image, their purpose and what they believe in. How do the most successful artists differentiate themselves? What is compelling about those artists is that they all represent something and have a unique story that people can associate with. They have a brand image that sticks in the minds of fans and connects with them in an extraordinary manner. Susan Boyle was the underdog that defied all odds. What a great story. Everyone wanted her to succeed. While Taylor Swift appealed to audiences with an innocent, girl-next-door image, Lady Gaga positioned herself on the opposite side of the spectrum: risqué, wild and cutting edge.

Your Brand and the Internet: Why .MUSIC will replace .COM as the Industry Standard for Official Music Websites

Internet users search the web using “keywords.” The dominance of Google was a direct result of providing users with the best search result for the keyword phrase they were looking for. Google’s bread and butter is connecting “keywords” with relevant websites and monetizing using targeted sponsored ads.

The other way Internet users search the web is typing the website directly into their browser. However, unless you have a distinct name, there is minimal chance you will be able to register your brand name in .COM. Some trivia questions to illustrate my point.

The list goes on and on. We are talking about superstar artists who do not even own their .COM! The Wall Street Journal wrote an excellent front-page article, in February 2010 called “From ABBA to ZZ Top, All the Good Band Names Are Taken: Internet Age Raises Stakes for Being First” written by John Jurgensen. The article illustrates the difficulty of finding an available band name and the intense competition surrounding the ownership of artist brand names, not only locally but internationally.

• All artists that want to register a .COM domain that is generic will fail. Those names are gone. They were all taken in the 90’s by domainers.
• There is no useful method of organizing the web in regards to music
• Our reliance on Google to be discovered is high. Be found on Google or you are considered insignificant.
• Official music websites have no consistent domain structure that correlates to music. They are either .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, .BIZ, .MOBI or country domains such as .US, .TV, .FM, .UK, .DE, .FR, .AU, .CA and so forth.

I attended a discussion group named “The Incredibly Useful / Worthless Artist Website” that featured Lee Hammond, the Director of New Media at Interscope. He was kind enough to share information about Lady Gaga’s official website and the importance of owning your own domain name and website. He stated that an enormous amount of traffic originates from users typing the “LadyGaga.com” URL directly into their browser or through search engine traffic for terms relating to Lady Gaga.

I logged in to my Google Adwords account and verified the numbers. The term “Lady Gaga” alone on Google has tens of millions of monthly searches. If you consider the long-tail of “Lady Gaga” keyword search phrases, then you uncover literally over 100 million Lady-Gaga-related searches. The challenge is how do you optimize your website to be the top search result for all of the competitive keyword surrounding your brand name. Can you accomplish this with a free Myspace, Twitter or Facebook profile?

There is minimal chance to accomplish this using these free services. Lady Gaga serves as a clear example how you can build your search engine credibility (Also known as PageRank) and help your website be discovered using thousands of keyword combinations. You might not have the clout of Lady Gaga but you have to start somewhere and do it right from the beginning. Remember, Lady Gaga was dropped by her label initially, but her hard work, music and branding strategy paid off. When there is a will, a strategy and tactics that accommodate the strategy’s goal, then there is hope.

Just like any traditional business, an ecommerce, user-friendly and user-focused website is paramount to your success. Big brands have huge followings across social media websites but they all have a home where they funnel all that traffic to.

The challenge though is finding the right name that will represent your brand. If you are a solo artist, then the chances are that your full name will be your brand name. The problem is no-one will know what you represent since you are starting out. The first step is to choose your name and then get a web address that best represents who you are and that would help Internet users and others identify what your brand is associated with. The advantage of owning a .MUSIC address is that it gives you a branding and marketing advantage over traditional domains as well as eliminates any confusion about what activity you are involved in: music.

If one chose Jess Doe as an artist name would JessDoe.com or JoeDoe.music make more sense? Remember, if you are starting out, you are trying to convey to the world that you exist, that your music matters and that you are worth the time to be listened to. If you tell a random person your website address ending in .COM and ask them what the website’s content is about, they will have no clue. However, if the web address ended in .MUSIC, then the message will be clearly communicated that it is a music-related site. People love convenience and speed. If you make them think too much, then you might lose the opportunity to shine. Why not maximize your chances for success and branding?

Having the prime keyword “.music” in your website address is important to your search engine strategy, since it helps other webmasters and Internet users link to your site naturally, using the keyword “music” in their link tag since it is part of the website address. They will link to you naturally using 2 keywords: your brand name and the word .MUSIC. This will help propel you in the search results for music-related terms that are associated with your brand and let everyone know what you are offering on your site.

There are many reasons why the music community needs a .MUSIC official website. Here are 23 reasons:

1. You own your website as opposed to “renting” through a 3rd party website. By owning your domain name website, you have no fear of being deleted because you are being too “commercial” or violating other 3rd party websites’ Terms of Service. The .MUSIC open, transparent, web-based web infrastructure and platform decreases the music community’s heavy reliance on Google and Apple and their closed infrastructure and controlled distribution system for search and digital downloads respectively. Google and Apple’s main income is derived from search marketing and hardware devices respectively, where music is considered a loss leader. Google and Apple are also heavily invested in mobile (Android and iPhone) as well as in apps, where they also control distribution through their “four-walled world” and proprietary software. Through browser direct navigation search, .MUSIC open ecosystem can help shift the power from these technology companies back to the music community and increase music consumer willingness to pay
2. You can claim your brand on the web and prevent others from taking your name
3. You are branding yourself and building your brand equity, not a 3rd party website
4. You increase your web exposure
5. You have a stable presence on the web. You never know whether 3rd party website will exist in the future or be as relevant. What happens to all that work that you put into the 3rd party website if that happens? You helped them create THEIR brand not yours. The old MP3.com is a classic example. Artists used MP3.com as their main website but then the company was shutdown. The rest is history. How much time was devoted by artists on Myspace the past 5 years to increasing their fan/friend following? If most of those “fans” migrated to Facebook and no longer use Myspace where does it leave you? Unless you captured their email through your official site, then you are in trouble. What is popular today might not be popular in the future. You can differentiate and use social pages as tools to build relationships and customers, but do not put all your eggs in baskets that you have no control of. Drive them back to your home: your website.
6. You control your search engine results. Be ranked #1 for your artist/band name and brand. If you have your own dedicated domain name it is easier to accomplish that. Additionally, your official website can gain search engine credibility (or pagerank) from links that point to your official site.
7. Building your brand is a long term strategy
8. Visitors to your website have a much higher sales conversion ratio than 3rd party sites. This point alone should remove all doubt. You get what you pay for. Do you want higher profit margins or lower?
9. You control all the content and how your brand image is visualized
10. You portray professionalism and legitimacy. Would anyone in the press or in the music industry take you more seriously if you had a website or if you did not have a website? First impressions count.
11. You can funnel and aggregate all your social media and widgets in one location, where it is convenient for your fans to find information about you and interact with you
12. You can be flexible. You can create polls and add custom sections, widgets or any modules of your choice without being limited to 3rd party restrictions
13. You can own your shopping cart and enjoy higher profit margins
14. You can add your own advertising and sponsors on your page
15. You can offer unique products, bundles and competitions for your fans
16. You build credibility and brand loyalty with your fans, by building relationships with them You can add a fan club section for your superfans as well as post on dedicated message boards to communicate and interact with your fans as well as receive constructive, useful feedback
17. You can effectively build your online presence by link to and from all your official social media pages
18. You can add tracking code, such as the free Google Analytics. This way you can measure your performance and see what parts of your site get the most traffic. Using such metrics can help you measure your site performance and conversions and assist you in making changes to improve your bottom line profitability
19. You can collect emails and create a newsletter designed to keep you in touch with your fans, give them up-to-date news and increase sales. It is more expensive to acquire new fans than to maintain your current following. Recurring sales are integral to your success
20. Have a branded email address with your brand name in the domain name e.g name@band.music
21. Invest in yourself and not others. Websites are like cheap virtual real estate property. Why wouldn’t you invest in your domain name for only the costs of a few Starbucks a year? The Return on Investment will amaze you
22. Customization of content depending on how fans are interacting with your content: adapting to environment and consumer needs
23. Monitor data for site engagement and analysing data on external and internal user interactivity. By using key performance indicators, website owners can make strategic decisions based on the data analysis depending on goals, such as maximizing conversion rates, leveraging brand marketing or focusing on generating revenues (acquisition marketing / selling)

The main challenge that artists face in creating their official websites is dealing with all the associated technical issues and answering these questions:

• What domain name do I get?
• Where do I get the domain name?
• How much the domain name costs?
• What hosting company do I use?
• How much do I pay for hosting?
• Who can create my official website?
• How much will it cost to design my own custom website?
• How do I get my website ranked in the search results?
• How much does it cost to search engine optimize (SEO) my site?
• How do I add a shopping cart for my products?
• How much does it cost to integrate a shopping cart and what are the fees?
• How do I make changes on the website?

These are the most frequently-asked questions musicians ask in regards to building their official website. They are considered to be the prime barriers to entry for bands and musicians who are interested in having their own home on the web.

The goal of .MUSIC is to once and for all remove all these barriers to entry and offer an all-in-one solution – the DotMusic Premium Channels – that would save artists a significant amount of money as well as provide them with the tools to create the website that they envision. No programming knowledge will be required.

 

How do Music Consumers & Music Community benefit from .MUSIC?

Today’s Internet domain space does not offer trust or credibility to consumers for determining if the music website visited is official and legitimate. Unfortunately, 95% of all digital music is pirated according to IFPI. Piracy and monies flowing to unlicensed music site owners hurts music artists. Unlicensed music websites are also risky to visit because of their high probability of infecting Internet users’ computers with malware, spyware and viruses.

The objective of the .MUSIC domain is to offer artists, industry professionals and music companies a safe haven and trusted Internet zone that Internet users can identify as authenticated, verified, credible, organized and consistent. This ensures that monies will flow directly to the artists and the music community, not to pirates or illegitimate website owners. This added level of authenticity will also increase customer trust, awareness and loyalty towards the brand name the .MUSIC domain is associated with.

The .MUSIC domain will be to the music community as the .EDU domain is to the educational community: Safe, trusted, recognized, credible, consistent, self-explanatory, and organized. Music fans no longer have rely on search engines for their music search. They can simply input the .MUSIC website address URL of their choice directly into their web browser. Key advantages and benefits for music fans and Internet users will be increased speed, reliability and simplicity. Artists and music entities also benefit by receiving increased traffic and higher conversions in regards to lead generation and music sales.

 

How does .MUSIC get Official Websites more traffic through SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts always highlight the significance of having your brand name in the web address URL as well as your primary keyword that describes what you do or sell. The .MUSIC domain simultaneously integrates both techniques, without increasing the length of the website domain by adding unnecessary characters. This ensures music entities are easily recognized with the shortest and most memorable domain.

This way, search engines such as Google or Bing will be able to recognize the relationship between both the brand and the specific primary .MUSIC keyword extension. As a result of the strong association, high relevancy and the link popularity (credibility) of the .MUSIC domain, search engines will favorably rank the official website higher in the search results. Top search engine results translate into increased traffic, high conversions and more sales or leads.

 

What Are Examples of .MUSIC domain name web addresses?

Artist: MichaelJackson.music, Madonna.music, Eminem.music
Band: U2.music, Radiohead.music, MGMT.music, Beatles.music
Indie Band: ShaynaZaid.music, TheXX.music, ArcadeFire.music
Musician: JimmyPage.music, LarsUlrich.music, Flea.music, Slash.music
Composer: DianeWarren.music, DesmondChild.music, BobDylan.music
Manager: PaulMcGuinness.music, IrvingAzoff.music, DocMcGhee.music
Producer: QuincyJones.music, DrDre.music, BrendanOBrien.music
Engineer: AndyWallace.music, GeoffEmerick.music, EddieKramer.music
Promoter: BillGraham.music, PhilipAnschutz.music, ChuckMorris.music
Industry Pro: JimmyIovine.music, TedCohen.music, BobLefsetz.music
Company: Universal.music, Myspace.music, Ticketmaster.music
Org./Association: ASCAP.music, RIAA.music, Grammy.music
Venue: RadioCityHall.music, KeyClub.music, HollywoodBowl.music
Radio: KROQ.music, Pandora.music, BBC.music, Sirius.music, XM.music
Studio: AbbeyRoad.music, RecordPlant.music, CapitolStudios.music
Song: BohemianRhapsody.Queen.music, PokerFace.LadyGaga.music
Album: Nevermind.Nirvana.music, BackInBlack.ACDC.music
Genre: Rock.music, HipHop.music, Country.music, Pop.music
Geographic: Japan.music, Texas.music, London.music, Africa.music
Cultural: Greek.music, French.music, Arabic.music, Bollywood.music
Education: Juilliard.music, MENC.music, Berklee.music, MI.music
Mood: Love.music, Sad.music, Aggressive.music, Happy.music
Instrument: Guitar.music, Drum.music, Piano.music, Bass.music
Keyword: Download.music, Buy.music, License.music, Lyrics.music